As a soon to be beginning teacher, one of my fear is that I won’t engage students with my lessons. While on Edutopia today I saw two articles to keep in mind as I start student teaching and work on developing my teaching style. The first about burning your podium, here, which mentions Gee and gamification (I’m in!!.) The second is reasons for starting each day off with a poem, here, which intrigues me. I noticed in a creative writing class I’ve been observing that students really don’t like poetry and other than articulating that they don’t like the form, they couldn’t really give concrete reasons why. I’ve wondered if it isn’t partly because they don’t see it frequently enough and when they do see it, they have a hard time engaging with the form. I especially found it odd, because some of them were crafting great poems, so about how much they hate poetry.

This is a great article about ditching literacy practices that don’t work. I think as educators sometimes we want to keep doing what has worked for otehrs, but we need to only use what works for out indiviual teching styles and our students’ learning styles.

I like the idea of book clubs in the classroom for a number of reasons. One being that it would hopefully get the students interested in reading outside of the classroom, and hopefully for pleasure. I have a few ideas of how book clubs could work, but I’m looking for ways in which other educators have incorporated them into their classrooms.

A few articles I’ve been looking at to help me figure out how others use book clubs, and possibly inspire how I might use book clubs.

I read an amazing article earlier this winter about creating a lesson play about fostering empathy in high school students around the subject of bullying. I think as an ELA teacher empathy is something I would like to try and instill in my students if at all possible. I’m using this post as a place to keep resources about emptahy in the classroom.